9/01/2006 @ 3:40PM

Back to School

I’ll take a PB&J on white, hold the peanut butter.

Students returning to grammar schools in Madison, Wis. this month will find that the cafeteria is no longer handing out peanut butter sandwiches. In Hoboken, N.J. students can’t bring even their own peanut butter to school. At the Aina Haina Elementary School in Honolulu, a peanut patrol made up of parents and lunchroom supervisors roams the cafeteria and places a bright pink card on any table where a peanut product is spotted. The table is disinfected and the kids must wash their hands–and around their mouths–with soap. Says Rachel Bernstein, whose third-grader is allergic to peanuts: “It’s a life-and-death situation for them.”

Maybe. From 1.5 million to 3 million Americans suffer from peanut or tree-nut allergies, depending on whether the peanut industry or the Food Allergy & Anaphylaxis Network, an advocacy group, is counting. And the incidence of peanut allergy is apparently growing, according to New York City’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine and the allergy network. Why? Doctors suggest it’s because obsessive parents are keeping their children’s environments so hygienic that they’re not exposed to certain allergens enough to make them immune.

But how many people really die from peanut allergies? The figure 150 a year recurs in newspaper and Web accounts. But it’s not an authoritative number.

The federal government keeps track of deaths from all sorts of causes (194 from hornets, wasps and bees from 1999 through 2002, for instance) but not from peanut allergies, in part because of the low number of fatalities. A running tally of cases maintained on PeanutAllergy.com, an information forum that pushes for tighter controls on peanut products, lists only 13 U.S. deaths–six were adults–since 1996. All were caused by the accidental eating of a peanut product, none merely by being too close to someone else’s food.

One reason for the increased attention: the highly publicized story of the Canadian girl, 15, who died last November after kissing her boyfriend, who had eaten peanut butter hours earlier. One problem: After the story reverberated worldwide–an Internet search turned up 38,000 references–the coroner’s report months later showed that the teenager died of asthma after being exposed to smoke at a party. A search for that fact generates 15,000 results.

Guaranteeing that no food allergen enters a school is “almost impossible,” says Cheryl Resha, a registered nurse who consults for the Connecticut Department of Education. “It provides a false sense of security.” Instead, the state’s food allergy guidelines for public schools suggest allergen-free zones, such as lunch tables set aside for students with food allergies, helping to reduce exposure that can cause rashes and other reactions. To prevent allergy-related deaths, many schools also keep epinephrine injectors on hand to stop severe allergic reactions.

So where does the estimate of 150 peanut-allergy deaths a year come from? Scott Sicherer, a researcher at New York’s Jaffe Food Allergy Institute, looked at a 1999 study of tiny Olmsted County, Minn., which had just one confirmed death from anaphylaxis–a severe allergic reaction–from 1983–87. Then he extrapolated this for the whole country, coming up with 600 to 800 anaphylaxis deaths a year. Then he figured that 30% to 55% of anaphylactic cases are from food allergens, based on “several sources,” and took the conservative end of the range, arriving at 200 deaths a year. Of those, he figured 63% were peanut-related. His conclusion: 100 to 150 deaths a year.

Celebrating Planters’ 100th birthday this year, Mr. Peanut certainly can’t be happy with such junk science. The New Yorker magazine recently ran a cartoon of the Planters mascot on a date getting dumped. The caption: “It’s not you, it’s my anaphylaxis.”